Don’t Let Washington Ban Cellphones in Your Car

May 15 (Bloomberg) -- Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood
slapped down Reuters for reporting a few weeks ago that he wants
“a federal law to ban talking on a cell phone or texting while
driving any type of vehicle on any road in the country.”

His press secretary, Justin Nisly, called the report
inaccurate, saying LaHood merely wants “Congress to incentivize
states to pass anti-texting and driving legislation, similar to
the approach taken to prevent drunk driving and promote seat
belt use.”

It’s not a reassuring comment, because LaHood’s crusade
against what he calls the “epidemic” of distracted driving long
ago lost contact with any sense of reasonable limits.

LaHood has said he is considering a ban on the use of
mobile phones, even hands-free ones, in cars. He says, “We
should set the standard at the safest place to be.” He has also
said, “You can’t drive safely when you are trying to adjust your
GPS system or the radio.” He has announced as well that the
government is looking into technology that would disable phones
in cars.

The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent
federal agency allied with LaHood on this issue, wants states to
ban all portable devices, whether hand-held or hands-free, with
exceptions for emergency calls and the use of navigation
systems.

An Overblown Epidemic

You’d have to be a pretty hard-core libertarian to insist
that the government can’t, in principle, regulate people’s
behavior in cars even if it poses a risk to others. Not many
people object to drunken-driving laws. But we should have a
presumption against regulation, and overcoming that presumption
ought to require solid evidence.

And the evidence for LaHood’s “epidemic” talk is overblown.
Advocating the NTSB’s preferred ban, its chairman Deborah
Hersman noted that 3,092 people had died in distracted-driving
incidents in 2010. The Transportation Department estimates that
Americans drove 3 trillion miles that year. That works out to
970 million miles driven for each distracted-driving fatality.

To put these numbers in further perspective: Drunken
driving caused more than three times as many fatalities. And
mobile phones were not the main cause of distractions, either,
even if Hersman implied that they were. In 2009, the
Transportation Department found that phones were either being
used by or “in the presence of” a driver in 18 percent of
distracted-driving fatalities. Another department report
concluded that “conversing with a passenger was the most common
source of distraction” from inside cars.

Even as digital devices proliferate, our roads are getting
safer, not more dangerous. The same news release that announced
3,092 distracted-driving deaths for 2010 pointed out that
traffic fatalities were at their lowest in six decades. The
roads would have been even safer if more drivers had paid
attention to the road instead of their phone calls. But that
problem hasn’t been severe enough to reverse the downward trend
in fatalities.

There is little evidence that state laws already enacted
against text-messaging while driving are saving lives, either.
In 2010, the Highway Loss Data Institute, a nonprofit research
organization sponsored by the insurance industry, found that
these laws had actually increased accident rates, perhaps
because they lead to drivers’ “hiding their phones from view,”
which requires them to move their eyes further from the road. It
is easy to imagine some of LaHood’s other ideas having similarly
perverse consequences. I don’t know about you, but putting a
destination into a built-in GPS system seems a lot less
dangerous to me than unfolding a map and reading it while
driving.

An accident in Missouri in 2010, in which a 19-year-old
driver had been sending text messages before getting into a
crash that led to two deaths and 38 injuries, illustrates the
enforcement problem. It was this accident that led to the NTSB’s
recommendation. But Missouri law already banned drivers under 21
from sending text messages.

Costs and Benefits

When LaHood’s aide talks about “incentivizing” states, what
he means is that the federal government should withhold
transportation funds unless states pass tough laws. That’s what
the government has done on drunken driving. But there is no case
for such federal intervention in the case of distracted driving.
We don’t know what policies will pass a cost-benefit test.
Different states might make different trade-offs between risk
and convenience, and there is no reason every state needs to
make the same one.

The federal government should therefore let states set
their own policies. Some would concentrate on education,
particularly for young drivers. Others would restrict texting,
but allow hands-free phone calls. Very few, it seems safe to
say, would ban navigation systems. Over time we would learn more
about which regulatory model works best, and states could draw
on that information in designing and refining their policies.

James Pericola, a chief of staff at the NTSB during the
Clinton administration who is now at the Seward Square Group
lobbying firm, says LaHood’s hostility to drivers’ use of
technology “is just not realistic.” Companies that provide
technology for drivers, such as GPS makers, have also been slow
to see the danger of overregulation and to resist LaHood, he
adds. “No one is standing up for the consumer on this issue.”

LaHood has taken to dealing out his own low-tech punishment
to drivers who use mobile phones: He honks his horn at them.
That’s got to be distracting for everyone nearby.

(Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior
editor at National Review. The opinions expressed are his own.)

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